


Vitiation

by kyrilu



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dom/sub Undertones, Glove Kink, Loneliness, M/M, Manipulation, Non-Consensual Touching, Non-Sexual Kink, Not Canon Compliant, Power Dynamics, Pre-Season/Series 02, Sensory Deprivation, Skin Hunger, Touch-Starved, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-04
Packaged: 2018-02-11 17:36:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2077044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first language that Will learns to speak is human contact. It is every person’s native tongue, attachment theory at work, but Will Graham is born with an unorthodox interpretation of it. He is an unwitting translator and linguist.</p><p>He has his empathy. He doesn’t like physical contact, but he needs it.</p><p>Or: the one where a handcuffed, touch-starved!Will Graham takes off Matthew Brown’s orderly gloves with his teeth. Because reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vitiation

**Author's Note:**

> Haha. Well.
> 
> This is basically my attempt to write hurt/comfort fic, but failing miserably because wow, shiny non-sexual kink! and wow, shifting power dynamics! /facepalm

Whoever touches the dead shall be unclean for seven days. They must purify themselves with the water on the third day and on the seventh day; then they will be clean...If they fail to purify themselves after touching a human corpse, they defile the Lord’s tabernacle.

Numbers 19: 11-13.

 

* * *

His stay at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is an unchanging routine. He wakes. He eats breakfast, lunch, dinner, the food bland on his tongue. Some days he is taken to the showers or the exercise room, always handled gingerly, distantly, impersonally, through the fabric of gloved hands. When the day is over, he sleeps.

Hours pass. Days pass. Will lies on his cot for most of the time, his hands folded over his chest and his mind wandering. He falls into the familiar pull of his imagination, winding the silver ribbon of the river around his mind, and he thinks of shimmering fish.

Alana had visited while Will was in recovery for his encephalitis. She had told him that she would watch his dogs for him, and then she had left. Her eyes had been sad and angry. She didn’t want to listen to Will’s denials--of course she didn’t, Hannibal Lecter has woven his web well.

This is a burgeoning investigation, where there is too much evidence, too much doubt. Will knows very well how murder cases work, and he can see the net that is being drawn around him. Jack Crawford hasn’t come by, and Lecter hasn’t come back.

Two weeks ago, Chilton had a therapy session with him in a room filled with cages, but he hasn’t sent for him again, presumably discouraged by Will’s non-responses.

This is a waiting game. Will doesn’t know when his trial is. The investigation is still ongoing, stretched across states: Minnesota, Virginia, Maryland, places where the Copycat Killer had supposedly struck, leaving corpses in his wake.

There are not any clocks on the walls. He feels the days slip by, composed of his visions and dreams. He holds himself up with them. He holds himself together with his promised reckoning.

 

* * *

The first language that Will learns to speak is human contact. It is every person’s native tongue, attachment theory at work, but Will Graham is born with an unorthodox interpretation of it. He is an unwitting translator and linguist.

He knows how to read people. His father, his classmates and teachers at the schools he attends, his fellow police officers in New Orleans, and the darknesses of murderers--everyone, all of them. He can decode their shifts of body language and speech patterns; he can feel the gears of their minds. It is a filter that he can’t shut off. It makes Will Graham who he is, held together by a non-stop program of cryptology and transcription.

There is a flipside to this language. He can access people mentally, reaching to make indirect contact, but he needs something substantial to ground himself at his edges. Something to remind himself that he is a separate entity from the minds that he accesses. He is Will Graham within his own body.

He doesn’t _like_ physical contact. He doesn’t like eye contact. He didn’t like it when Jack Crawford pushed up his glasses. He didn’t like it when his students turned in their papers to him, hands brushing for mere seconds. Physical contact only reminds him that he can’t shut off this decoder within him.

He doesn’t like physical contact, but he needs it. He had needed his father’s rough, warm hugs that smelled of the sea. He had needed the easy camaraderie of the New Orleans police force, arms slung around his shoulders and hearty thumps on his back.

When he started using his empathy in full force, for his cases as a homicide detective and later, in the FBI, he had, consciously, recoiled from human touch. He had started to shrug off friendly gestures from the other officers. He had avoided befriending FBI agents, simply working beside them, and when he had the chance, he taught at the academy instead. He has his dogs as substitutes: a cadaver dog from the New Orleans’ K-9 unit, his pack of strays in Wolf Trap.

Will’s imagination cannot fail him. At BSHCI, he continues to return to the river. He returns to the memory of Abigail’s smile. He returns to the feeling of calmness while he holds a fishing pole over the water. He even returns to his nightmares, because there is a sort of substance to these, too. He isn’t sick any more. He has clarity.

But this thing--this other, insidious longing--nags at him from inside out. He doesn’t want it. He has never wanted it.

Yet he feels the blankness like a canvas across his skin. He wants to rub his fingers against one of his dog’s fur-covered muzzles, and feel a paw settle against him. He wants Alana to kiss him again. He wants Jack Crawford to act as his rock, to try again and stop him from getting close, although he had failed. He wants to solve a case with Beverly Katz. He wants Abigail to be alive, and for Hannibal Lecter to not be what he had revealed himself to be.

 

* * *

Will’s first tangible lesson in physical contact is this: there was a death that he couldn’t stop in New Orleans. A man had been shot, right in front of him, a drug deal gone wrong. When Will came home, he had collapsed onto his bed. The scene had replayed in his head, unyielding, unending. The sound of gunfire. The smell of the victim’s cigarette. The way he had fallen, a pool of blood splattering underneath his splayed limbs.

In his imagination, Will was the killer instead. But then he had felt the weight of the big black dog from the K-9 unit--Buddy--and he had breathed. Calmed. Twisted a hand in Buddy’s fur, making contact, and he shivered against him until he stopped.

Touch doesn’t get rid of the nightmares, but it’s a balm.

When he wakes up, he trembles. He feels Hannibal Lecter in his head, and he wants to kill him, but he’s Hannibal Lecter at the same time. He sees Abigail Hobbs dying by his hand and all those others, the Copycat Killer living up to his title.

Will grips himself across his forearms, hands clenched.

 

* * *

There’s a change.

The routine seems to repeat again. An orderly takes him to the showers. The orderly uses the same short, simple commands which Will complies with, offering his hands out to be cuffed. The orderly locks each restraint, cold metal against skin. Then he closes the mask against Will’s face, and when Will breathes, he sees the haze of his breath fog up the surface of it.

The orderly isn’t wearing his gloves. He has an intensity on his face that is almost completely concealed, but it’s there. It makes his eyes darker; he moves around Will carefully and firmly.

Will feels the brush of the orderly’s palms on his face, on his arms, on his shoulders, on the small of his back. For the first in a long while, Will is suffused with sensation, as easy and soft as the times when his dogs had moved against him. Warmth and presence.

He turns to look up at Matthew Brown.

The orderly gives him a flicker of a smile. The smile transforms his face: he is not the same orderly who had spoken to a co-worker in a muted lisp, or the orderly who had talked to Will in a brisk tone. The smile disappears as he stops at the shower room, starting to remove Will’s restraints. Business as usual.

Before Matthew leaves Will to shower, one of his hands curl around Will’s upper arm, fingertips tracing out a semicircle.

The water streams down Will’s body. He closes his eyes. He realizes that the only things he can feel are the lingering traces of the orderly’s hands.

 _Human contact_ , Will thinks. He feels a little bit more rooted in reality, coaxed quietly out of the company of his visions, out of Hannibal Lecter’s head. But he wonders whether Chilton somehow knew, and put Matthew Brown up to the task. He wonders if Chilton is trying to rewrite his identity like he had rewritten Abel Gideon. Or maybe Matthew Brown is perceptive in his own way.

Will has never wanted this pathetic dependance. He wants his freedom, and he wants his vengeance. He leans against the tiled wall of the showers, looking at his eyes in a misted mirror, and he thinks that he’s going to be sick.

 

* * *

The touches don’t stop.

When Matthew reaches to hook the mask across the back of Will’s head, his hands drag through the curls of his hair. When he snaps handcuffs in place, his thumb makes a line across Will’s wrists. When Will is in the exercise room, chained to walk in a circle, around and around, Matthew is beside him.

His eyes almost seem to dare Will to say something, but Will is silent.

In a way, it’s the balm that he was searching for. Will is more corporeal. He can keep track of time. His dreams remember the momentary, fulfilling warmth. They make him remember Alana and Abigail and Jack and his dogs and his father with a clarity that is painful, but comforting. The old recognition, again--the memory of how it feels to be touched.

He is, at a sharp, visceral level, disgusted at himself. He doesn’t want to be reduced to _this_ : to relying on an orderly whose intentions that even he can’t divine, to responding to the first real human contact in imprisonment like it is oxygen rushing into his lungs, bringing him back to consciousness as if he is a drowning man.

But Will can focus _._ The world is a little bit less blurred.

 

* * *

 A whisper through the bars: “Just ask, Mr. Graham.”

And then the touches start to fall away. Matthew Brown begins wearing his gloves again, and the trembling comes back. The worst of the nightmares come back. Time is a nonsensical jumble, and Will feels himself numbing again, falling back against his cot and trying to remember the shapes that Matthew’s fingers had traced across his skin.

The first time that Matthew does it, he holds Will’s chin in place with the thick fabric of his gloves between them, forcing eye contact. He straps the mask on. Will’s mouth parts, half-open, a question, but just like before, he says nothing.

It would sound too much like desperation if he had spoken.

Maybe it’s better. He doesn’t want to be indebted. He doesn’t want to be played, as if his body is a violin that Tobias Budge would enjoy playing. He knows that what Matthew Brown is doing is something that verges on cruelty, and compassion, and what it means when the two are together. He doesn’t know what game this is.

Will tries to find his own anchor, his own rock, but he can’t grasp anything. He needs the solidity, the certainty, the immobility of physical contact.

He doesn’t feel alone, because alone isn’t a sensation. He is detached, seesawing between the murder scenes of his pendulum ( _I am Hannibal Lecter and this is my design_ ), and the fragile peace of the river.

The dominos are crashing down. Will wakes up from a nightmare with a sob caught in his throat. For not the first time, nor the last, he wonders what Hannibal Lecter has done to him. For not the first time, nor the last, he thinks: _Even Dr. Lecter touched me_ , even if there always seemed to be boundless, precise meanings behind each touch. Maybe Lecter knew. Maybe he knew that this imprisonment, suspended in time, would be the best sort of sentencing for Will Graham.

 

* * *

 What does Matthew Brown want from him?

 _He wants what everyone else has wanted_ , Will thinks. Will thinks of the murderers that he had chased, with their hungers and their corpses and their darknesses. Will thinks of Hannibal Lecter letting him fragment apart: sickness and suggestions and delusions.

_He wants what I want._

Contact.

Connection.

 

* * *

In the exercise room, Will looks Matthew Brown in the eye, and Matthew gives him that curve of a smile. He unchains Will from the pole in the middle of the room, leaving him with only a pair of handcuffs. Takes the mask from his mouth. Steps backward, with his gloved hands shrugged into his pockets. This is a measure of trust.

Matthew says, “Do you know what hospitalism is, Mr. Graham?”

“Yes,” Will says, quietly.

He knows what it is.

Once, he had compared Garrett Jacob Hobbs to a pitiful child in a hospital. A child that is fed, kept warm, but not put on machines. The child would die because they let him die, but he doesn’t die. He survives, and looks normal.

Will thinks, now, that it’s not always the neglect of machines that would take them to this brink.

“You’ve exhibited a very progressed form of it,” Matthew says, and he seems amused. “I’ve seen it in some patients before, but it usually took months. Years. Most of them are too drugged up or too incoherent for it to matter, but I’ve seen it. But you have an empathy on you that makes you not like the others, don’t you?”

“You’ve been reading Freddie Lounds,” Will says, his voice tight. There is an admiration in Matthew’s words.

Matthew tilts his head, a nod. “Yeah. But she’s wrong about something important -- you’re not a killer, even though you’re here, even though you can get into the heads of murderers. Who made you, Mr. Graham? There’s always somebody out there who makes people like us.”

“Nobody made me.”

Matthew laughs, softly. He says, “Somebody did. You’re a mirror. I see how you move whenever I move around you. Weeks ago, through one of the bugs, I heard how you talked to Dr. Chilton. You talked like him. And I know about the cases you tackled while in the FBI.

“We haven’t evolved beyond the Tower of Babel, Mr. Graham. Because they had conspired to commit blasphemy, the builders of Babel had their languages scattered by God. But we still have a common language of understanding, and somewhere along the line, we became bound to somebody who transformed us. Yours put you here, to take credit for what they did. Mine still has his identity etched on my skin, in my voice.

“I don’t want him any more,” Matthew says, and his eyes are like dark, hungry sparks. “What do you think we could be together?”

“Two mirrors,” Will says, turning the answer over in his head. They are standing across from each other, Will with his hands still cuffed behind his back. He forces himself to hold eye contact--contact, this is what Matthew Brown wants.

This is an offering, perhaps. An opportunity. Reaching out from beyond the echoes of Hannibal Lecter in his head, beyond his cell bars and his imagination and his dreams. Matthew Brown had touched him and pulled away, making himself known to Will, trying to show that he’s _here_.

“You want your own identity,” Will says. “Your own name.”

Somehow, Will brings up a Bible verse from memory, a long-ago Sunday mass with his father, and he says it out loud, Matthew Brown’s language spoken back to him. He emphasizes each syllable: “‘His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.’”

Will pauses, and continues, “But you think you need more than yourself.”

Matthew makes a flourish with his arm; he looks pleased by the Bible reference. “I’m at your service, Mr. Graham.”

Will asks, “What would you do?”

As if he’s pushing Matthew. Testing him. Will is a prisoner, and Will is vulnerable when it comes to the matter of contact, but he needs to fumble to find the reins of this conversation. To take control.

“Anything,” Matthew says.

Will chooses to start somewhere. He chooses the one thing that Matthew had discovered and had used on him. He says, “Take off your gloves.”

A rustle of fabric, but it’s only Matthew removing his hands out of his pocket. He holds his gloved hands out to Will, and that crooked smile darts on his face. “All right. I’ll touch you, Mr. Graham. But only if you take them off.”

Will raises an eyebrow, and he jangles the his handcuffed hands at his back. “You know very well the predicament I’m in, Matthew.”

Matthew’s grin grows wider, playful. “Then I suppose you’ll have to beg, won’t you?”

No.

Will lowers himself onto his knees, feeling the cold floor through his coveralls. He hears Matthew’s indrawn breath in response, in surprise, and Will thinks: _Good._

Will cranes his head to Matthew’s left glove, and sets his teeth against the white fabric.

He bites, tugging from the edges of the fabric fingertips. They taste sterile, like nearly everything in the hospital, metallic and bitter, but Will closes his mouth over the glove. He begins, fingertip by fingertip--Matthew’s thumb, his index finger, his middle finger, his ring finger, his little finger--and the effort makes his mouth feel dry. His tongue skims over the clothed pads of Matthew’s fingertips, tracing the skin underneath, and then he twists his teeth over the clothed fringes and _pulls._

Matthew’s hand is almost completely exposed. Gently, Will pulls the fabric again, and the glove falls to the ground at his feet.

When he looks up, Matthew’s eyes are half-lidded and glassy, his lips half-parted. Will wonders how he looks, how Matthew sees him: Will Graham kneeling on the ground, his hair a half-fringe over his eyes, and his mouth curling over his fingers.

With a murmur, Matthew says, hoarse, “Right glove.”

Will does. But this time, first, he brushes his mouth over the back of Matthew’s clothed hand, his teeth grazing from there to his fingertips. It could almost be a kiss; it could almost be an oath of fealty, but it’s more the other way around, loyalty from Matthew Brown to Will Graham.

Thumb, index, middle, ring, little.

Will counts the fingers. He sets his jaw over the white fabric corners, and leaves faint vestiges of saliva behind.

He can’t help but press a quick bite on Matthew’s index finger, a nip. Matthew’s body shifts in response; he leans forward, shaky, and Will smiles against the fabric. He presses another semblance of a kiss on the glove--although it’s not a kiss, he doesn’t want to think of it as a kiss--and Matthew’s eyelids blink, flutter.

The right glove is finally off. It drifts onto the ground beside its counterpart, and Will is left to look at the bare plains of Matthew’s hands. He has the tactile memory of the orderly’s touch still seared in his brain. The out-of-the-blue tenderness of it. It’s what Will has been waiting for, anticipating, asking for. This is a game, and it’s not a game.

“Your turn,” Will says.

And Matthew smiles _._ It’s not the amused, teasing expression that he had shown Will, but it is...blissful, open. He lowers himself so that he’s on his knees in front of Will, so that they’re nearly eye level. After denying him this for so long, he finally _touches_ him, and Will has to stifle a sound like a gasp.

Matthew’s hands hold Will’s face, cupping his chin, his stubbled cheeks. His hands are warm and soft, and they have that same sterile smell that his gloves had. Will presses himself, closer, into the lines of Matthew’s offered palms.

He thinks he can feel Matthew’s pulse through the pads of his fingers, pinpricks of movement on his skin. Touch. Contact. This is how it feels like, exposing and being exposed, and he thinks he can feel the whole of Matthew’s body, the pulse running down his wrist and toward his neck and into his chest. They are two mirrors shattering together, and bleeding together, and breathing together.

He can’t take his eyes off of Matthew’s eyes, which are intent, unflinching.

Matthew says, “Now. Tell me what to do.”

Will closes his eyes, and whispers to him about taking Hannibal Lecter apart.


End file.
